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'..... .... } 1 " ...... .... . -.... \ ...( "';- 'ì , \: '( <. l ., " ' # "\... ..... ,., v Maquls have raided the hotel, reprisals are ordered, and Lucien is sent, with an S.S. man, to arrest France and her grandmother (Therèse Giehse) Lu- CIen has no feelings one way or the other about hauling them in-so little sen timen t that he reclaims a gold watch he looted earlier and gave to Mr. Horn in a buttenng-up gesture. The German takes it away from him, how- èver, and Lucien, piqued, shoots him. It is perfectly apparent that if the Ger- man had not pocketed the watch, which Lucien felt was properly his own, Lu- cien would have stood by as France was taken away. (He wanted hIS watch back because he didn't see why it should be wasted. ) Yet with the S.S. man dead Lucien needs to get away, and he escapes, with France and her grandmother, to the coun- tryside. When we see him in his natural enVIronment, setting traps, killing game, making love to France, and once even lying flat on the ground and laughing like an innocent, confident boy, we know, wIth absolute conviction, that he has no sense of guilt whatever. His face is as clear as Lieutenant Calley's. Malle's hero could have been placed almost anywhere at any time, but it is right for a French artist to place him where Malle dId. The director J ean- Pierre Melville, who was himself a member of the ResIstance, said in an interview that when he came out of the theatre after seeing "The Sorrow and the PIty" he Saw Roland Petit and Zizi J eanmalre in the queue waiting for the next performance, and his first reflex was to pretend that he hadn't seen them-he felt as though he'd been caught coming out from a por- nographic film. The pornography of "The Sorrow and the Pity" is in the shameful ordinariness of the people who betray their fellows. The movies, with theIr roots in stage melodrama, have conditioned us to look for evi] in social devIants and the physically aber- rant. The pornography that Malle delves into makes us think back to the protests of innocence by torturers and mass murderers-all those normal- looking people leading normal lives who said they were just doing their Job. Without ever mentioning the sub- ject of innocence and guilt, "Lacombe, Lucien," in its calm, leisurely, dispas- sionate way, addresses it on a deeper level than any other movie I know. , (10" ('kE T OUIS MALLE has always heen an L alert and daring director who didn't repeat hImself, but in recent SEPTEMDER 30. 1974- years, since he broke with the smooth professionalism and surface sophistica- tion of his early work and made the series of documentaries that forIn "Phantom India," he appears to have begun anew. The picture he made aft- er that experience, the hIgh comedy "Murmur of the Heart," set in 1954, suggested an artist's autobIographical first work, except that it showed a mas- ter's command of the medium. Now he has gone back farther, to the pellod of his childhood (he was born in 1932), to events he couldn't make sense of "Lacolnbe, Lucien" is more of a test even than India: Malle could approach India in terms of his own sensibility, but in "Lacombe, Lucien" he is trying to seek \ out and create a sensibility utterly different from his own In all the most important ways, he succeeds, trium- phantly. But in a million small ways he falls flat. Malle's ear- lier films were very precise, the work of an orderly, classical mind; the} were films by a Frenchman who be- lieved in reason, and although the Indian series brought out the humanist in him, he remained the raisonneur. This time, he's workIng on a subject that can't be thought out, and he's going on Instinct. His greatest involve- ment is in the looser material, and when he stays with the gambler-im- proviser's intuitIve method, he WIns. [n thIs film, Malle is best at what he's never done before-the almost word- less Scenes, especially; he gets perhaps even more than he'd hoped for from PIerre Blaise's Lucien. In these scenes, it's not just that one can't separate Lu- cien's innocence and his corruption but that they really seem to be the same thing. However, Malle can't give a sense of life to all the situations he puts Lucien in. He seems to have lost in- terest in the scripted scenes, and there's a fatal hint of the obligatory in some of them. In setting up the atmosphere in the hotel, Malle probably knew that it was tricky to try to suggest that these Nazi collaborators, aping authority, are like bad actors. However, we have to extrapolate his subtle intentions, because the situationc;; are often inert. The two scenes involving Lucien's affair with the hotel maid are glaringl) uncon- vincing, and contradictory besides. In the first, before gOIng to bed wIth him she gives him a little Resistance talk, telling him that the Americans are winning, and warning him against having any more to do with the Nazis; in the econd, after he is involved with